The Art of Working with Heat: A Guide to Finding the Perfect Balance

Great heat shrink tubing is essential for many DIY projects, but finding the right product can be a challenge. The author of this article has discovered that the key to success lies in understanding the properties of various materials and learning how to work with them effectively. One of the most important tools for any heat shrinking application is a heat gun, but not just any heat gun will do.

For those new to working with plastics like warbler or kydex, abs, or styrene, acrylic, it's essential to understand that these materials can be hygroscopic, meaning they draw water in. If you heat them up too quickly, the water molecules inside can turn to steam and bubble, ruining your entire project. To avoid this, it's crucial to learn how to apply heat gently but effectively.

The author has experimented with various heat guns over the years, including a corded version that is still widely available today. However, they found that these tools can be too harsh for some applications. The cordless heat gun, on the other hand, offers a more balanced approach. Its battery-powered design allows for precise control over temperature and airflow, making it an excellent choice for delicate materials.

One of the most significant advantages of the cordless heat gun is its ability to avoid overheating. Unlike traditional heat guns, which can reach extremely high temperatures, this tool only produces a moderate amount of heat. This makes it perfect for working with plastics that are sensitive to extreme temperatures. The author has found that this tool allows them to "creep up" on their projects, gradually warming the material until they achieve the desired result.

The cordless heat gun is also an excellent solution for those who want to work with materials they haven't tried before or haven't used in a long time. By starting with low temperatures and gradually increasing the heat, you can build confidence and develop a sense of control over your projects. The tool's two settings – high and low – provide a range of flexibility, allowing you to choose the perfect temperature for your specific needs.

In addition to its many benefits, the cordless heat gun is also incredibly easy to use. Simply plug it in, turn it on, and adjust the temperature as needed. The author has found that this tool is particularly useful when working with heat shrink tubing and lugs, which can be tricky to work with without the right amount of heat.

The battery-powered design of the cordless heat gun also makes it an excellent choice for those who want to avoid burns or other injuries. Unlike traditional heat guns, which can produce extreme temperatures that can cause serious injury, this tool is designed to be safe and controlled. The author has found that this tool allows them to work with confidence, knowing that they are in control of the temperature and airflow.

The cordless heat gun is also a valuable addition to any maker's toolkit. Its ability to provide precise control over temperature and airflow makes it an excellent choice for delicate materials, while its safety features make it suitable for beginners as well. Whether you're working with plastics, metal, or other materials, this tool is sure to become a trusted companion in your workshop.

As the author notes, the cordless heat gun is not just a useful tool – it's also a valuable learning experience. By experimenting with different temperatures and techniques, you can develop a deeper understanding of how heat works and how to apply it effectively. The many screw-ups and mistakes that the author has encountered over the years have been invaluable in teaching them about this subject.

The Demerit Badges of the Maker's Workshop

One of the things that sets this channel apart from others is its focus on what almost always happens – mistakes and screw-ups in the maker's workshop. The author believes that these mistakes are an essential part of the learning process, and they've created a system of demerit badges to celebrate the many errors that have occurred over the years.

From touching paint jobs to gluing fingers together, there are many ways to mess up in the workshop. But don't worry – even if you're not a maker, these mistakes can still provide valuable lessons. The author notes that having blackened fingernails is often an indicator of reduced pain and discomfort, making the injury less severe.

These demerit badges are also available as a fun addition to any maker's apron. Whether you're working on a project or just hanging out in the workshop, these badges can add a touch of humor and personality to your workspace. And who knows – maybe one day, they'll become a standard part of maker culture.

Conclusion

The cordless heat gun is an incredibly versatile tool that offers a balanced approach to heating materials. Its battery-powered design allows for precise control over temperature and airflow, making it perfect for delicate plastics and other materials. By learning how to use this tool effectively, you can achieve professional-looking results without the risk of overheating or burning your fingers.

As the author notes, finding the perfect balance between heat and control is essential in any maker's workshop. Whether you're working with plastics, metal, or other materials, it's crucial to develop a sense of confidence and control over your projects. The cordless heat gun is an excellent tool for achieving this balance, and its safety features make it suitable for beginners as well.

So why not give the cordless heat gun a try? With its many benefits and versatility, it's sure to become a trusted companion in your workshop. And who knows – maybe you'll even earn yourself some demerit badges along the way!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip about heat guns you might think you don't have a need for a heat gun i would submit that you have already used one everyone's used a heat gun because everyone's used one of these and making just like cooking uh frequently involves the use of temperature to transform something and as such uh within the realm of making that i specialize in just like cooking becoming attuned to how to apply temperature in both direct and harsh and also potentially sometimes gentle and soft ways is really important so this is a long way of bringing you around to a new heat gun that i've added to my collection but i i want to start with the first heat gun everyone uses which is a blow dryer um i'm using this one right now it's fine it's fine i don't love it i don't hate it it just is what it is i miss my conair yellow bird but they're like 65 bucks you can still buy them but they're sort of dumbly expensive and this was like 20 so i bought a couple of them um blow dryers are really great for drying things with drying painted things for warming mostly it's for setting and drying stuff that's what i use blow dryers for these don't put out enough heat to implement heat shrink tubing they don't yeah they don't put out enough heat to bend plastic uh which in and of itself is actually kind of great one of my favorite heat tricks with one of these is to make a very very um gentle oven and i do that by taking a cardboard box i might have around the shop and cutting a hole in it and then putting this over something that i want to dry and popping the blow dryer in there and just starting it going this is a super gentle oven it raises the temperature to about 120 degrees maybe which really isn't enough to melt the most industrial things most products um so you don't have to worry about the fact that you're applying too much heat to a thing the cardboard hotbox has been a regular part of my repertoire since the very earliest days of making things now when i became more professional uh and i could afford to spend some of my income on tools that would help me earn more income well i moved up to uh a corded heat gun and this is dewalt's version of this milwaukee makes one i have one of each uh i couldn't find the milwaukee for some reason i must have lent it to oh no the milwaukee heat guns at my house that's why i was doing something over there with it at any rate most corded heat guns operate about the same way they've got a temperature control on the back they put out usually two speeds low and high uh and dewalt has this nice thing up here so you can actually get really up and close and not burn yourself on the burner here i'll turn that off um these heat guns are great you should have one you should have one in your collection these are great for heat shrink tubing these are great for softening up plastic like warbler or kydex or abs or styrene or acrylic it works with all of those things one of the issues though is it can get incredibly hot and it's very easy when applying heat to go too far and you only learn how not to go too far by going too far the only way you can make whipped cream is if your first time making it you go all the way to butter which is just like one notch pass whipped cream and then you always know where to stop um with these they foment mistakes because uh they can get really hot you can you know if you're doing working with acrylic you have to know that it's hygroscopic it draws water in so you heat up acrylic too fast uh the water bubbles can the tiny water molecules that are in the acrylic uh turn to steam and bubble inside the acrylic and that can ruin your whole day polycarbonate is the same so how do you deal with applying uh too much heat well like i said it has this half setting but even still i've gotten into it it can get so hot down here close to the element that the burn happens so quickly therefore for some applications i want something that is between the gentleness of this and the harshness of this enter the battery-powered heat gun wait a minute let me get a battery i i saw this i was literally just thinking i wonder what new tools dewalt has made in the cordless system which i have and i saw it made a cordless heat gun and i was like which takes a lot of battery power to heat a heating element like it may be one of the most power intensive things to do to so these create heat by shorting through some copper wires in here that are not copper but they're something that can handle being red hot nichrome i'm not even sure uh but there's wires in here that are shorted so electricity the angry pixies build up and they they cause the wire to glow red and then the air blows past that and that's how you get your heat but shorting something and putting enough angry pixie electrons into it to get it to glow red is very very power intensive so i just bought this the tool only uh because i was like how useful is that going to be i kind of want to know and the answer is it's phenomenally useful because it is because it is a perfect medium between these two poles there we go it is a perfect medium between these two poles uh i this doesn't put out a lot of heat their solution to the extreme battery draw of high heat is that they don't put out high heat like this will never burn me if my hand is here it gets warm it's never going to burn me out here and that is kind of perfect it allows me to creep up on a heating situation where i am not sure how it is going to go sometimes well frequently i am working with materials i haven't tried before or haven't used in a long time uh and so i like to creep up on my solutions rather than coming from the top down and this allows me to do it uh it only has two settings it'd like to like the corded a high and a low let's see that's the high that's the low uh this totally will activate heat shrink tubing and um heat shrink lugs with the low temperature solder that melts inside the heat shrink this is so perfect for those because it won't burn the wires around your thing like this will ask me how i know um well yeah this is a really simple quick and dirty 10 minute tool tip about heat guns and why they're necessary for the process and my maybe you should invest in one of these middle ground battery powered heat guns thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip yeah i think i've covered everything i'll see you guys next time cheers one of the things i love about this channel is that we don't make how-to videos so much as we make what happened videos and what almost always happens are mistakes and screw-ups in fact they're completely integral to making and honestly to being a person and to celebrate this tested has a new batch of demerit badges for the screw-ups you will encounter in the shop from left to right we have touching your paint job assembling things backwards losing a tiny screw or part gluing your fingers together and smashing your thumb and frankly if you haven't done both of these even if you're not a maker i just don't feel like you've experienced enough of the world i'm not saying get out a hammer and smash your thumb but i will tell you that the blackier your fingernail after the injury the less it's going to hurt in the long run i almost forgot these make excellent additions to your shop apron and they are available at tested dash store dot comhey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip about heat guns you might think you don't have a need for a heat gun i would submit that you have already used one everyone's used a heat gun because everyone's used one of these and making just like cooking uh frequently involves the use of temperature to transform something and as such uh within the realm of making that i specialize in just like cooking becoming attuned to how to apply temperature in both direct and harsh and also potentially sometimes gentle and soft ways is really important so this is a long way of bringing you around to a new heat gun that i've added to my collection but i i want to start with the first heat gun everyone uses which is a blow dryer um i'm using this one right now it's fine it's fine i don't love it i don't hate it it just is what it is i miss my conair yellow bird but they're like 65 bucks you can still buy them but they're sort of dumbly expensive and this was like 20 so i bought a couple of them um blow dryers are really great for drying things with drying painted things for warming mostly it's for setting and drying stuff that's what i use blow dryers for these don't put out enough heat to implement heat shrink tubing they don't yeah they don't put out enough heat to bend plastic uh which in and of itself is actually kind of great one of my favorite heat tricks with one of these is to make a very very um gentle oven and i do that by taking a cardboard box i might have around the shop and cutting a hole in it and then putting this over something that i want to dry and popping the blow dryer in there and just starting it going this is a super gentle oven it raises the temperature to about 120 degrees maybe which really isn't enough to melt the most industrial things most products um so you don't have to worry about the fact that you're applying too much heat to a thing the cardboard hotbox has been a regular part of my repertoire since the very earliest days of making things now when i became more professional uh and i could afford to spend some of my income on tools that would help me earn more income well i moved up to uh a corded heat gun and this is dewalt's version of this milwaukee makes one i have one of each uh i couldn't find the milwaukee for some reason i must have lent it to oh no the milwaukee heat guns at my house that's why i was doing something over there with it at any rate most corded heat guns operate about the same way they've got a temperature control on the back they put out usually two speeds low and high uh and dewalt has this nice thing up here so you can actually get really up and close and not burn yourself on the burner here i'll turn that off um these heat guns are great you should have one you should have one in your collection these are great for heat shrink tubing these are great for softening up plastic like warbler or kydex or abs or styrene or acrylic it works with all of those things one of the issues though is it can get incredibly hot and it's very easy when applying heat to go too far and you only learn how not to go too far by going too far the only way you can make whipped cream is if your first time making it you go all the way to butter which is just like one notch pass whipped cream and then you always know where to stop um with these they foment mistakes because uh they can get really hot you can you know if you're doing working with acrylic you have to know that it's hygroscopic it draws water in so you heat up acrylic too fast uh the water bubbles can the tiny water molecules that are in the acrylic uh turn to steam and bubble inside the acrylic and that can ruin your whole day polycarbonate is the same so how do you deal with applying uh too much heat well like i said it has this half setting but even still i've gotten into it it can get so hot down here close to the element that the burn happens so quickly therefore for some applications i want something that is between the gentleness of this and the harshness of this enter the battery-powered heat gun wait a minute let me get a battery i i saw this i was literally just thinking i wonder what new tools dewalt has made in the cordless system which i have and i saw it made a cordless heat gun and i was like which takes a lot of battery power to heat a heating element like it may be one of the most power intensive things to do to so these create heat by shorting through some copper wires in here that are not copper but they're something that can handle being red hot nichrome i'm not even sure uh but there's wires in here that are shorted so electricity the angry pixies build up and they they cause the wire to glow red and then the air blows past that and that's how you get your heat but shorting something and putting enough angry pixie electrons into it to get it to glow red is very very power intensive so i just bought this the tool only uh because i was like how useful is that going to be i kind of want to know and the answer is it's phenomenally useful because it is because it is a perfect medium between these two poles there we go it is a perfect medium between these two poles uh i this doesn't put out a lot of heat their solution to the extreme battery draw of high heat is that they don't put out high heat like this will never burn me if my hand is here it gets warm it's never going to burn me out here and that is kind of perfect it allows me to creep up on a heating situation where i am not sure how it is going to go sometimes well frequently i am working with materials i haven't tried before or haven't used in a long time uh and so i like to creep up on my solutions rather than coming from the top down and this allows me to do it uh it only has two settings it'd like to like the corded a high and a low let's see that's the high that's the low uh this totally will activate heat shrink tubing and um heat shrink lugs with the low temperature solder that melts inside the heat shrink this is so perfect for those because it won't burn the wires around your thing like this will ask me how i know um well yeah this is a really simple quick and dirty 10 minute tool tip about heat guns and why they're necessary for the process and my maybe you should invest in one of these middle ground battery powered heat guns thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip yeah i think i've covered everything i'll see you guys next time cheers one of the things i love about this channel is that we don't make how-to videos so much as we make what happened videos and what almost always happens are mistakes and screw-ups in fact they're completely integral to making and honestly to being a person and to celebrate this tested has a new batch of demerit badges for the screw-ups you will encounter in the shop from left to right we have touching your paint job assembling things backwards losing a tiny screw or part gluing your fingers together and smashing your thumb and frankly if you haven't done both of these even if you're not a maker i just don't feel like you've experienced enough of the world i'm not saying get out a hammer and smash your thumb but i will tell you that the blackier your fingernail after the injury the less it's going to hurt in the long run i almost forgot these make excellent additions to your shop apron and they are available at tested dash store dot comhey everybody adam savage here in my cave with a tool tip about heat guns you might think you don't have a need for a heat gun i would submit that you have already used one everyone's used a heat gun because everyone's used one of these and making just like cooking uh frequently involves the use of temperature to transform something and as such uh within the realm of making that i specialize in just like cooking becoming attuned to how to apply temperature in both direct and harsh and also potentially sometimes gentle and soft ways is really important so this is a long way of bringing you around to a new heat gun that i've added to my collection but i i want to start with the first heat gun everyone uses which is a blow dryer um i'm using this one right now it's fine it's fine i don't love it i don't hate it it just is what it is i miss my conair yellow bird but they're like 65 bucks you can still buy them but they're sort of dumbly expensive and this was like 20 so i bought a couple of them um blow dryers are really great for drying things with drying painted things for warming mostly it's for setting and drying stuff that's what i use blow dryers for these don't put out enough heat to implement heat shrink tubing they don't yeah they don't put out enough heat to bend plastic uh which in and of itself is actually kind of great one of my favorite heat tricks with one of these is to make a very very um gentle oven and i do that by taking a cardboard box i might have around the shop and cutting a hole in it and then putting this over something that i want to dry and popping the blow dryer in there and just starting it going this is a super gentle oven it raises the temperature to about 120 degrees maybe which really isn't enough to melt the most industrial things most products um so you don't have to worry about the fact that you're applying too much heat to a thing the cardboard hotbox has been a regular part of my repertoire since the very earliest days of making things now when i became more professional uh and i could afford to spend some of my income on tools that would help me earn more income well i moved up to uh a corded heat gun and this is dewalt's version of this milwaukee makes one i have one of each uh i couldn't find the milwaukee for some reason i must have lent it to oh no the milwaukee heat guns at my house that's why i was doing something over there with it at any rate most corded heat guns operate about the same way they've got a temperature control on the back they put out usually two speeds low and high uh and dewalt has this nice thing up here so you can actually get really up and close and not burn yourself on the burner here i'll turn that off um these heat guns are great you should have one you should have one in your collection these are great for heat shrink tubing these are great for softening up plastic like warbler or kydex or abs or styrene or acrylic it works with all of those things one of the issues though is it can get incredibly hot and it's very easy when applying heat to go too far and you only learn how not to go too far by going too far the only way you can make whipped cream is if your first time making it you go all the way to butter which is just like one notch pass whipped cream and then you always know where to stop um with these they foment mistakes because uh they can get really hot you can you know if you're doing working with acrylic you have to know that it's hygroscopic it draws water in so you heat up acrylic too fast uh the water bubbles can the tiny water molecules that are in the acrylic uh turn to steam and bubble inside the acrylic and that can ruin your whole day polycarbonate is the same so how do you deal with applying uh too much heat well like i said it has this half setting but even still i've gotten into it it can get so hot down here close to the element that the burn happens so quickly therefore for some applications i want something that is between the gentleness of this and the harshness of this enter the battery-powered heat gun wait a minute let me get a battery i i saw this i was literally just thinking i wonder what new tools dewalt has made in the cordless system which i have and i saw it made a cordless heat gun and i was like which takes a lot of battery power to heat a heating element like it may be one of the most power intensive things to do to so these create heat by shorting through some copper wires in here that are not copper but they're something that can handle being red hot nichrome i'm not even sure uh but there's wires in here that are shorted so electricity the angry pixies build up and they they cause the wire to glow red and then the air blows past that and that's how you get your heat but shorting something and putting enough angry pixie electrons into it to get it to glow red is very very power intensive so i just bought this the tool only uh because i was like how useful is that going to be i kind of want to know and the answer is it's phenomenally useful because it is because it is a perfect medium between these two poles there we go it is a perfect medium between these two poles uh i this doesn't put out a lot of heat their solution to the extreme battery draw of high heat is that they don't put out high heat like this will never burn me if my hand is here it gets warm it's never going to burn me out here and that is kind of perfect it allows me to creep up on a heating situation where i am not sure how it is going to go sometimes well frequently i am working with materials i haven't tried before or haven't used in a long time uh and so i like to creep up on my solutions rather than coming from the top down and this allows me to do it uh it only has two settings it'd like to like the corded a high and a low let's see that's the high that's the low uh this totally will activate heat shrink tubing and um heat shrink lugs with the low temperature solder that melts inside the heat shrink this is so perfect for those because it won't burn the wires around your thing like this will ask me how i know um well yeah this is a really simple quick and dirty 10 minute tool tip about heat guns and why they're necessary for the process and my maybe you should invest in one of these middle ground battery powered heat guns thank you guys for joining me for this tool tip yeah i think i've covered everything i'll see you guys next time cheers one of the things i love about this channel is that we don't make how-to videos so much as we make what happened videos and what almost always happens are mistakes and screw-ups in fact they're completely integral to making and honestly to being a person and to celebrate this tested has a new batch of demerit badges for the screw-ups you will encounter in the shop from left to right we have touching your paint job assembling things backwards losing a tiny screw or part gluing your fingers together and smashing your thumb and frankly if you haven't done both of these even if you're not a maker i just don't feel like you've experienced enough of the world i'm not saying get out a hammer and smash your thumb but i will tell you that the blackier your fingernail after the injury the less it's going to hurt in the long run i almost forgot these make excellent additions to your shop apron and they are available at tested dash store dot com\n"